Wichita Menu Photography for Real Dishes

Plan the shoot around Wichita's daylight

Wichita sits at about 37.7 degrees north, and that latitude gives you very different window light in June and December. Around the June solstice the city gets roughly 14 hours 37 minutes of daylight and the noon sun stands about 76 degrees above the horizon, which means light comes down steeply and a north-facing window stays bright and soft for most of the working day. Around the December solstice there is about 9 hours 23 minutes of daylight and the noon sun is only about 29 degrees high, so low sun rakes in through south and west windows for hours and throws hard shadows across a plate.

Build a seasonal schedule rather than shooting whenever there is time. From late spring through summer, shoot between mid-morning and mid-afternoon at a north window, or use a window that faces away from the sun and add a white foam board on the shadow side. In winter, the low sun is the problem: shoot at a south or west window only in the two hours after sunrise or the two hours before sunset, or hang a thin white curtain to diffuse the raking light. A cheap incident light meter or a phone light-meter app tells you whether the window is giving you a consistent exposure from dish to dish.

Whatever the season, keep the same window, the same table height and the same distance from glass for the whole menu. Consistency across a menu comes from repeating one setup, not from finding the best light for each plate.

• June: north window, mid-morning to mid-afternoon, white board opposite the light.
• December: south or west window, first two hours after sunrise or last two before sunset, curtain as diffuser.
• Overcast days in any month: the most even window light of the year, good for brothy and pale dishes.
• Record the time, window and camera distance for each session so the next batch matches.

Batch shooting a full menu without losing consistency

Group dishes by how they photograph, not by menu order. Sear and crust items such as steak or grilled chicken want soft side light to keep texture visible; brothy bowls want a slightly higher angle so the surface and garnishes read; fried items want to be shot within a couple of minutes of plating so they do not flatten. Shooting all the grilled plates in one pass, then all the bowls, then all the fried items, keeps your lighting and angle changes to a minimum and shortens the session.

Set a fixed camera height and angle per group. A 45-degree angle suits most plated entrees and sandwiches; a straight-overhead 90-degree shot works for pizzas, shared platters and flat presentations. Keep the plate at the same position on the table, mark the spot with tape, and keep the camera at the same distance so every dish fills the frame the same way. Shoot one test frame, check it on a laptop or tablet, then do not touch the tripod until the group is finished.

Shoot wider than you need. Frame each dish with a little space around the plate so the same file can be cropped square for delivery tiles, vertical for social and landscape for a printed menu spread. Take one clean plate shot and, if the dish is served with sides, one shot that shows the full presentation.

• One group per lighting setup: grilled, brothy, fried, cold, desserts.
• Same camera height, angle and distance for every dish in a group.
• Shoot at the widest crop you might need, then crop per channel.
• Capture a clean plate shot and a full-presentation shot for items served with sides.

Name files so the photo and the menu item never drift apart

The most common menu-photo failure is not a bad photo, it is a good photo attached to the wrong item after a menu edit. Name every file with the menu item, a version date and the channel it was cropped for, for example brisket-plate_2025-03_square or pho-tai_2025-03_vertical. Use the same item name that appears on the menu and in your point-of-sale system, so a name change in one place is easy to trace in the others.

Keep a simple spreadsheet or shared document that lists each menu item, its photo file name, the date shot and the channels where it appears. When a dish changes portion, garnish or recipe, the photo is out of date even if it still looks good, and the spreadsheet is how you catch it. If your restaurant is part of a chain with 20 or more locations, remember that US rules require calorie counts for standard menu items, and FDA guidance covers online menus as well as menu boards. A photo must match the item the calories describe, so a swapped or outdated photo next to a calorie figure is a compliance problem, not just a design one.

Match crops to each place the menu appears

A printed menu, a QR menu and a delivery listing each need a different crop of the same dish. Printed menus usually want a landscape or portrait image that sits inside a column; QR menus are read on a phone, so a square or vertical crop that reads at small size works better; delivery tiles are square and get compressed heavily, so keep the food large in the frame and avoid thin garnishes at the edges that disappear. Export a square 1:1 for tiles, a 4:5 or 9:16 vertical for social and phone menus, and a 3:2 landscape for print.

Delivery platforms do not all publish pixel specs, so check the upload screen in each dashboard for the current requirements rather than working from a blog post. This site keeps spec pages for Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub and BentoBox for the United States, which summarize what each platform publishes; use them as a starting point and confirm in the dashboard before you export a full batch.

Keep photos in sync when the menu changes

Menus change faster than photo shoots happen. Set a rule for what triggers a reshoot: a new item, a change of plate or portion, a seasonal swap, or a price change on a printed menu that also shifts the layout. Small changes such as a new garnish can often be handled by reshooting that one dish in the same window and setup as the original batch, which is why recording your setup matters.

Review the photo set against the live menu once a month. Pull the current menu from your point-of-sale system, compare it to your photo spreadsheet, and list the items that are missing a photo, have an outdated one or are no longer sold. Retire old files rather than deleting them, so a dish that returns next season can be matched to its earlier shot.

For the restaurant's own channels, such as the website menu, Instagram, a Google Business Profile or a printed QR menu, FoodPhoto can take a real photo of your own dish and improve the light, background and crop while keeping the food as it is, and every photo comes as a kit of sizes. It does not guarantee approval by any platform, so upload your own real photos to delivery apps yourself.